Rend Enters Early Access July 31st

The ambitious PVP based survival game Rend will soon be entering the next phase of its release cycle by exiting Alpha and entering Early Access on Steam on July 31st. There is no official release time, but the official servers are expected to be back up around 1PM EST on the 31st.

I’ve had a chance to check out a bit of the Alpha build of the game recently and with the NDA being lifted last week, I can speak a little more about what the game is about.

Rend is a large scale survival game inspired by Norse Mythology that focuses on faction based PVP servers. When you load into a server, you choose one of three factions, and through the course of the game you earn faction exp to show your loyalty, sparks that increase faction crafting tiers unlocking new items and buffs and so on, and collecting spirits which get deposited into your tree which is needed to win the game. The team with the most spirit, which is something like 100,000 or something, will win. This takes place over the course of a month or two, or so I have been told, and during that time, there are events called The Reckoning that allows the shield on your faction base to fall causing evil spririts to attack your base, but also it opens it up for enemy players to enter and steal your spirit.

After an unfortunate start to the game after a recent reset, I was experiencing a lot of rubberbanding from the server and a difficult time grasping the basic survival and crafting mechanics as a result. However, an hour or two later, I managed to understand what can be eaten and how to gain enough of a basic kit of tools, weapons, and armour to start attacking the low level animals for food. After that, it really comes down to picking what type of role you want to play in the bigger scope of the faction. I don’t have the best skill for building tactics for channeling enemies that charge your base, so I stick to harvesting and mining for now with the necessary killing of animals that get in my way.

So a majority of the game is spent building up all the shared resources, the shared tools, weapons, armour, buildings, experience and spirit to ultimately win the game. After the game is “won” you gain ascension points which help give your character a boost when you start again on a new server so you can gain experience faster, harvest faster and so on so that a base can be build quicker. This will likely mean quicker games, but I feel like it will still take a few weeks to play.

Ben is the Editor-In-Chief for Loud Mouthed Gamers and has grown up with a wide interest in video games. Starting as an FPS gamer, Ben has gained a renewed interest in RPG's and greatly enjoying the rich story games of old and new. He is currently going through his backlog while adding many new games all the time.